Worst Cyrodiil of all time right now

rbfrgsp · September 2021

neferpitou73 wrote: »

You said:

" begin running zone administrators who can issue official warnings against players and ban those with multiple strikes against their account."

and in this very post you said:

"police and ban"

Which clearly sounds like you want some administrative action against groups. Any distinction between ball groups and "regular" groups is tenuous at best and isn't something an administrator should be touching with a 10-foot pole. How are they supposed to tell the difference between a ball group and a "regular" group. What distinguishes a less skilled ball group from a "regular" group? Is it the skills, the sets? I see nothing wrong with a group running builds that support each other in PvP.

No, that's your misinterpretation. I made an observation of the problem, and gave the only two available choices beyond "do nothing and watch the zone slowly bleed out" (current favoured strategy).

As mentioned in another thread, game-breaking and exploitative tactics are primarily playstyle, not build, choices:

rbfrgsp wrote: »

Organisation is good. Group optimisation is good. Coordination via teamspeak or discord is good.

Busting into a keep and doing laps of the top floor is not good. Telling players on your own faction to go away because you're a ball group and they are not part of your group is not good. Picking scrolls and using them to farm instead of returning them to temples is not good. Dumping said scrolls in the fishes once you're done farming so they Respawn with enemy is not good.

Ballgrouping by itself is not a negative. The selfish choices of individual ballgroups is why everyone else wants them to go. If your group does not do these things, you are in the tiny minority.

This behaviour is incredibly easy to police, in the same way that flying meteor spammers were easy to police.

Which brings me back to the very first point I made: they must decide once and for all if that behaviour is legitimate. If it is - buy server space. If it isn't- start banning. Because they have tried everything else and nothing else works.

neferpitou73 · September 2021

rbfrgsp wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

You said:

" begin running zone administrators who can issue official warnings against players and ban those with multiple strikes against their account."

and in this very post you said:

"police and ban"

Which clearly sounds like you want some administrative action against groups. Any distinction between ball groups and "regular" groups is tenuous at best and isn't something an administrator should be touching with a 10-foot pole. How are they supposed to tell the difference between a ball group and a "regular" group. What distinguishes a less skilled ball group from a "regular" group? Is it the skills, the sets? I see nothing wrong with a group running builds that support each other in PvP.

No, that's your misinterpretation. I made an observation of the problem, and gave the only two available choices beyond "do nothing and watch the zone slowly bleed out" (current favoured strategy).

As mentioned in another thread, game-breaking and exploitative tactics are primarily playstyle, not build, choices:

rbfrgsp wrote: »

Organisation is good. Group optimisation is good. Coordination via teamspeak or discord is good.

Busting into a keep and doing laps of the top floor is not good. Telling players on your own faction to go away because you're a ball group and they are not part of your group is not good. Picking scrolls and using them to farm instead of returning them to temples is not good. Dumping said scrolls in the fishes once you're done farming so they Respawn with enemy is not good.

Ballgrouping by itself is not a negative. The selfish choices of individual ballgroups is why everyone else wants them to go. If your group does not do these things, you are in the tiny minority.

This behaviour is incredibly easy to police, in the same way that flying meteor spammers were easy to police.

Which brings me back to the very first point I made: they must decide once and for all if that behaviour is legitimate. If it is - buy server space. If it isn't- start banning. Because they have tried everything else and nothing else works.

- How is quoting you misinterpreting you?
- Running laps around a keep is a valid tactic in the same way attacking at a choke is a valid tactic. If ZOS doesn't like that behavior then they need to find ways to make that not a viable tactic
- Telling people to go away is toxic sure, but a bannable offense? Do we really want ZOS to start regulating tells and Zone chat more than they already do
- "tiny minority" please cite your source for this
- Again toxic behavior, not necessarily a group thing either. Bannable? How about ZOS just makes it so you can't do that?
- "everyone" again please cite. The forums are not the majority of players in the game, as much as the people on them would like to believe.
- "Easy to police" how? Please tell me how you, as an admin are going to tell the difference between a ball group and a normal group using tactics to win a fight. Does every group running around the top of a keep get banned? Do the groups who run scrolls along a strange path get banned? Does the group holding a back keep as a distraction get banned?

Banning people for delibrately using outside programs to cause lag is one thing and I would wholeheartedly support it. But punishing people who practice, train and use the best tactics available to them doesn't make any sense. Who is going to want to play in your game if you punish people who work hard to do well? If you don't want people using those tactics then you make them unviable in the first place

WaywardArgonian · September 2021

I know 'NPCs cause lag' is almost a meme, but has anyone noticed more lag fighting NPCs this campaign than fighting other players? Outside of ballgroup stacking, I've experienced the most severe lag fighting NPCs while taking resources. Yes, I was playing during prime time, but I was taking these resources far away from the 'hot spots', and the skill delay seemed more severe than when engaging actual players in those same areas.

rbfrgsp · September 2021

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Blah

Quoting is misrepresentation when you fillet out one half of the quote and focus only on the other half.

The funny part is that you have actually argued yourself into a circle and started arguing in favour of my original intention. As per my quote, organisation is not exploitation. But a ball group that makes up its own objectives is not playing the game mode that they are entering into. The game mode has set objectives. It is not a FFA deathmatch. Hence why I say maybe active moderation is a possible answer.

Alternatively, maybe the answer is to remove all AP from kills. That would render deathmatching pointless and harvesting would be ignored in favour of actual game objectives.

Of course, this would prove unpopular because the 90% of gamers playing in good faith would be punished because of the selfish choices of a minority. But isn't that what is already happening in cyrodiil anyway?

NotTaylorSwift · September 2021

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

EdmondDontes wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Vizirith wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

NotTaylorSwift wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

NotTaylorSwift wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

rbfrgsp wrote: »

Faction stacking doesn't impact performance in the way ballgrouping does. Go read some more threads about the various platforms, populations, servers, and game modes. The one constant everyone reports is "gets worse when ball groups appear".

Oh I'm very aware that certain groups intentionally spam abilities (usually AoE CC abilities) that they know will lag the server but that does not describe the entire universe of ball groups. Going off of combat logs and the number of casts/second by members of these groups, it also appears as though some of them are using... not exactly legal means to achieve this as well. That's honestly something that ZOS should investigate and ban said players/groups if they are indeed guilty.

But... grouping 100 random zerglings at Chalman or Alessia will achieve the same results. But there's an odd trend on the forum to romanticize the pugs and the faction-stack playstyle. It deserves no such sentimentality.

Just no to this also? Like.. make it make sense. Why would people want to intentionally cause lag? They are also affected by it. Ballgroups are also affected by lag. The group I play with wipes 9/10 now because of bad game performance. No one is going into cyro with the intention to spam aoes to cause lag. It’s not a conspiracy…

And also what are u talking about casts per second being too high and not legal. No one is cheating. Again, it’s not a conspiracy. I bet you have not even seen the combat logs of a real ballgroup to even get that impression…

But I agree with the last point.

Relax friend, I'm not accusing you of anything. No need to try to flex on me to make your point. I am alluding to one specific group but I'm also not trying to name names on the forum.

Also, about casts per second, yes, I'm sure that we are all completely shocked and scandalized that there are wares available online that can help you cheat in videogames. And here we all thought that ESO was a pure and exploit-free game....

I agree with you that lag is usually the unseen MVP of a group Death Recap. But it's also true that a ball group is insulated from lag to a degree that a random zone pug is decidedly not due to having many layered HoTs, Barriers, full raid buffs, etc. active during combat. That can and will keep a group alive through several GCDs of severe slowdown whereas the zone pug is a complete sitting duck.

I’m not saying you’re accusing anyone. I’m saying it doesn’t make sense what you said. No one is ‘cheating’ and no one is spamming skills with the intention to worsen lag. That is just not happening, it’s crazy to me that people think this is the case.

And yes of course we have more buffs/hots than pugs and there is nothing wrong with the sentiment of this as it only makes sense. But we feel the lag same as everyone else either way. If it takes 5 seconds for a solo player to get a skill out then it also takes 5 seconds for us.

There is software that allows palyers to auto-block, break-free etc. And around people I know who run such stuff the game behaves very funny. In agreement with everything else.

rbfrgsp wrote: »

Karm1cOne wrote: »

rbfrgsp wrote: »

So, to clarify, I posted the two remaining solutions to poor performance (add server cap or start banning ballgroups that exploit gameplay limitations), and you two are so defensive about ballgroups that you're saying I am wrong? Or right? Because your posts don't make a clear argument either way.

Your suggestion is to ban 12 players playing together, in a game mode designed for that, in a group size allowed? Wow.

I don't really have the inclination to argue with borderline thinkers.

There is nothing in my post that lends itself to your interpretation of "he's asking for all groups to be banned".

Ball groups have a very specific play style. That play style has a material impact on service delivery of Zos' commercial product.

Therefore, ZOS has to decide if that playstyle is a legitimate part of the game (buy server cap) or not (police and ban).

Please don't respond to this post if you're just going to troll.

You said:

" begin running zone administrators who can issue official warnings against players and ban those with multiple strikes against their account."

and in this very post you said:

"police and ban"

Which clearly sounds like you want some administrative action against groups. Any distinction between ball groups and "regular" groups is tenuous at best and isn't something an administrator should be touching with a 10-foot pole. How are they supposed to tell the difference between a ball group and a "regular" group. What distinguishes a less skilled ball group from a "regular" group? Is it the skills, the sets? I see nothing wrong with a group running builds that support each other in PvP.

Marcus_Aurelius wrote: »

NotTaylorSwift wrote: »

And yes of course we have more buffs/hots than pugs and there is nothing wrong with the sentiment of this as it only makes sense. But we feel the lag same as everyone else either way. If it takes 5 seconds for a solo player to get a skill out then it also takes 5 seconds for us.

One thing is spamming AoE like ball group do (look at death recap and you will see: Sap Essence, Wirlig Blade, Sub Assault, ...) where you are not targetting a specific player but just saturating the space with AoE damage, another is to try to use a single target skill.

Who do you think is affected more by lag? And what do you think affect more lag, a single target skill or a constant spamming of AoEs?

ZOS tested AOE skills last fall. Didn't have an effect (granted I don't know how many people were playing during those tests)

They definitely did have an effect, it just wasn't as much as they wanted. It was way too drastic to be realistically implemented and so they were hoping for just as drastic a difference in performance, they didn't get it. Fundamentally the use of aoe effects has to have more of an effect on server performance than single target abilities. There really is no way around that.

Most of the arguments against ball groups for their server performance is not that without them everything will be perfect without issue. Rather that minimizing their impact would arguably have the greatest effect for the littlest overall gameplay impact.

For example if they reduce server pop to 20, would performance get better? Of course but it would have a major impact on the average player's experience. So while it would have a great positive, it has a bigger negative. Same with the global aoe cooldown. They tried to make less impactful changes like reducing group size to 6 with no outside healing, and again while it did have a decent impact it did not have the "significant impact on performance" they wanted. It's all perspective. If lag can sit at 300 in a fight, but you do something with very little player experience impact and reduce the lag from 300 to 250, is it good? Yes it is, but they want something small to have a much better performance impact and it just isn't there.

So when people rail against ball groups it's usually hoping for a decent reduction in lag not a perfect fix. A ball group does tend to have a large performance impact for what amounts to 12 people. If a change can be made that inconveniences 12 people while making it better for the other 80? Or should it be what can be made that inconveniences the other 80 while making it better for the other 12?

I dismiss the idea that ball groups cause more lag than zergs. But we're likely not going to agree on that so I'll drop it.

My general point though is that this is a ZOS problem, not a player problem. ZOS could fix this problem today by allocating more servers to Cyrodiil, which they do every MYM, which generally results in higher (or at least similar) performance despite the fact that there are generally more people in Cyrodiil.

I cringe when I see people proposing heavy-handed solutions to what are really game mechanics issues. It's far easier, and more fun for players to adapt mechanics to incentivize the kind of gameplay you want and de-incentivize the kind of gameplay you don't want. Instead of implementing some ban-happy system that seeks to punish players for using viable tactics.

For instance, placing a lot of area of effect abilities in a small area? That's just the most optimal way to eliminate enemies. If you don't want people spamming abilities like that you need to find provide them with a more efficient way to eliminate groups of enemies. Because if there's a more optimal way to do so, the ball groups are going to adopt that.

I'd argue that there current approach to dealing with ball groups (providing sets that deal massive AOE damage) actually works against what they want to achieve. Since the ball groups just take those sets and stack that massive AOE damage set on every person in their group (which is what people warned them would happen with DC and indeed is exactly what happened) a far better way to deal with this issue would paradoxically be to make AOE damage less effective against groups, because then the ball group would be forced to use single-target abilities to take down enemies which (again if we concede that AOE abilities are the problem) would put less strain on the server. This would also give pugs a bit of a better shot, since the game's no longer about stacking AOE, but stacking single target.

In fact, my group has actually adopted this single target strategy because we're dealing more with zergs than ball groups lately, and single target damage is a better way to deal with enemies that are not stacked.

TLDR; If they want to change people's behavior they should provide incentives for people to play a different way. This way to problem fixes itself instead of relying on some new administrative system they'd have to work out.

Great post!

Limiting cross healing in some way would help too I think.

I was a big fan of the group-only healing changes but then all of the faction-stackers swooped in to bully ZOS into rescinding it.

Agree, I will never ever understand why Zos uses these trash forums as a way to gather information from players instead of just doing in game polls/surveys every now and then…

It’s just back and forward here. People just come here to complain about what they don’t like, no way can the forums portray anything ‘accurately’.

ResidentContrarian · September 2021

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

rbfrgsp wrote: »

Take the stance that ballgroups are using tactics to deliberately break the fundamentals of the game

The game breaks down and the lag intensifies because while 20 pugs can push the ballgroup off the flags, the ballgroup will then stalemate the fight for another hour by running the walls or otherwise avoiding any objective, until eventually 60 pugs zerg through the completely absurd amount of healing an optimized group can stack while staying moving. That rework of Healing Springs and RR was one of the worst changes for large scale PvP balance this game has seen.

Don't forget the lesser-known change where HoTs always heal before damage is applied, making stacking healing extremely powerful in all scenarios where you can't be one-shotted.

Even stacking HoTs alone is a very powerful tool to counter player(s) and completely decides BG matches in some cases. In fact, its behind my 100% win rate in BGs...

IMO siege should always have top priority. Actually, with how nerfed DoTs are, all DoTs should probably apply before passive healing does, if not only siege.

wrote:

[Quoted Post Removed]

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[Edited to Remove response to removed quote

Psiion · September 2021

Greetings all,

We have reviewed this thread and have had to remove a few back and forth Baiting posts. As such, we would like to remind everyone that Baiting is simply non-constructive, and is against the Community Rules as stated below:

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Moving forward, please keep the Community Rules in mind.

DrSlaughtr · September 2021

How about in pvp you can only have one HoT active at once?

-mr burns hand rub.-

XarOzz · September 2021

Not a forum person but made an account just because of this issue. I have lost desire to spend money on PVE parts of the game they are focusing on, I am easily in the over $1000 spent range even though I am in PVP 80% of my playtime (or farming stuff for PVP). I use to believe I should buy all their stuff to support the game even if I do not play it, I have not done any trials or most of the DLCs(I have Flawless conquer and perfect Vat stuff so not lack of ability) I just prefer content that you cant memorize each encounter.
I have just lost all trust in ZOS as a company for allowing such a great game (that was sold to me as a PVP game from an x DAOC exec) to get to this state. I have been patient since day one but you will probably see me on here more and more letting it be known I do not accept this as reasonable service for a monthly subscription.

ResidentContrarian · September 2021

TheEndBringer wrote: »

How about in pvp you can only have one HoT active at once?

-mr burns hand rub.-

The only problem is that mag classes have more than one HoT built into them. That means that the change would simply target mag, when it's already behind stam.

Also, with that kind of definition of a HoT will be used? Does that include Rally since it's still technically one too?

Lastly, the problem can be solved by targeting purge. Ask anyone how many ball groups bothered to enter Cyrodiil, and when they did, what happened when there was a ramping cost on purge.

Everyone knows exactly what happened, which is why ball group players don't want purge cost increase enforced by battle spirit.

Think about all the meta ball group "invincibility" days and most we can link back to purge spam or mechanics that heal and purge a lot that can be spammed or stacked, like Earthgore stack before it was nerfed, curse-eater stack before they forced direct heals only, Stendarr stack before it gained a global cooldown from all Stendarr instances instead of each player's, etc. - it's not coincidental...

Jameson18 · September 2021

I guess we will literally "see what tomorrow brings".

Oakenaxe · September 2021

I wish they would at least public recognize how bad Cyrodiil is. I wonder if they are working hard to improve it, I never see any response.